After all, he was himself a frequent defier of social protocol, to such an extent that he was at the center of a few scandals during his lifetime. It’s not surprising that Puccini (left) would want to write an opera about these Latin Quarter denizens. But their indignation is all artifice, a way of avoiding paying the rent. In the first act, our heroes and heroines get their landlord, Benoît, drunk, encourage him to confess his marital infidelities, act shocked, and then kick him out-without actually giving him the rent money.

Or sometimes, that disdain has nothing to do with anything grand. Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème, which premiered in 1896 in Turin, Italy, celebrates just that sort of defiance: its depiction of artists, musicians, and poets in Paris’s Latin Quarter honors their disdain for superficial social restrictions amid their pursuit of something grander.

Some would be considered scandalous even by today’s standards. Yet the 1800s were a time of remarkable political upheaval, social change, and artistic flourishing, and the biographies of those who defied society’s mores were far from puritanical. Looking back at the nineteenth century from our twenty-first-century vantage, the social values can often seem prim: Picture limply held handkerchiefs or averted glances from the church pew.

La boheme opera story